Word: frei
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...white and blue inaugural bunting was down from the lamp posts and buildings throughout Santiago, and the distinguished visitors had returned home to such faraway places as Ghana and Senegal. Last week Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, 53, Chile's newly-installed president by virtue of a resounding victory over Communist-backed Salvador Allende, called his first Cabinet meeting and got down to the toil of pulling his country back from the cliff edge of financial ruin...
...presidential election will be sounding around Latin America for years-and not merely because the Communists were thrashed in their attempt to take power by democratic means. Marxism has never succeeded at the ballot box. The bigger news is the man and the party that won: Eduardo Frei and the Christian Democrats, who are rapidly emerging as a vital new force, not only in Chile but in all of Latin America...
...Their ideology is not based so much on the tenets of Roman Catholicism; indeed, the church in Colombia openly opposes the Christian Democrats. Rather, the party rallying cry is the Christian ethic, and it calls for social revolution without the shackles of Communism. "Christian Democracy," says Chile's Frei, "believes that the modern world is in crisis, and that only a complete readjustment of society can save man from materialism and collectivism...
Such talk has a strong appeal for the underprivileged-and also for Latin America's deeply religious women, rich or poor. In Chile, it was the women who gave Frei his large majority. He broke about even with Marxist Salvador Allende for the men's vote; the women (who use separate ballot boxes in Chile) gave him almost 63% of their vote. Frei's own sister Irene, 46, was one of the country's most popular political figures until her death in an auto accident five weeks ago. In Santiago municipal elections last year, she herself...
...stronghold of Latin America's Christian Democrats is, of course, Chile, where the party has soared from 3.4% of the vote in 1941 to 56% in Frei's election. How much of this was due to Christian Democracy itself, and how much to Frei's charismatic personality, will not be clear until congressional elections next March. Right now, the party has only 27 members in Congress, 70 short of a majority...